SARATOGA SPRINGS —Skidmore College recently announced the 2017 Storytellers’ Institute’s five-week series of public events held across the college campus.
A highlight of the third annual event is a weekend-long documentary “Festosium,” held from Thursday, June 8, to Sunday, June 11.
The public events is part of a five-week summer program for documentarians, college undergraduates and faculty part of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS). It offers presentations of artistic work and feature symposium-style conversations around an annual theme.
All activities are open to the public and are free of charge.
This year documentary makers explore the theme of ‘Space and Place’ through film, sound, interactive media and museum curation to connect with audiences throughout the community.
Public events will feature an international group of storytellers who explore the subject of ‘Space and Place’ through film screenings, audio experiences, dialogues, and star-gazing in local spaces near Saratoga Springs and the Erie Canal. It also looks at locations outside the Capital District, such as Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Poland and India.
Documentaries, discussions, and lectures presented by Storytellers’ Institute Fellows and visitors feature filmmaker Brett Story (“The Prison in 12 Landscapes”); archaeoastronomer Tony Aveni, from Colgate University; Albany Symphony Orchestra director David Alan Miller; the data visualization work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the collaborative art/activism work of Laura Chipley and the Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol.
“‘Space and Place’ was selected as this year’s Festosium theme because understanding and communicating how spatial relationships operate is a fundamental part of documentary work,” said Jordana Dym, director of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative. “Spaces matter: anywhere that people live, work, play, worship, create, and connect shapes and provides context for our experiences. Through human activity these spaces become places, rich with memory and meaning. Places may be open or walled off, welcoming or inaccessible. The documentary work you’ll experience at Festosium will help us better understand, enjoy and rethink.”
During Festosium II, ‘Space & Place,’ audience members are invited to connect with an international group of storytellers, experience evocative work and conversations that excite reflection, engagement, and inspiration.
“Central to this year’s theme is confronting how race and class-based privilege grants access to space and place for some people and takes it away for others,” said Sarah Friedland, the newly appointed director of the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute. “The Institute features groups that use documentary techniques in activist work, such as the Anti-eviction Mapping Project and the Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol, highlighting a documentary’s role in preserving place and space and in resisting forced removal of people from the places and spaces they call home.
A full schedule of events is available at www.skidmore.edu/mdocs.
